My money is on Uncle Miltie's calculation. :-)
Guess the slightly different results are due to rounding off errors. In short, if all the judges were available for all three Trump-related cases the chance of Judge Marchan receiving all three of them if the cases were assigned randomly would been 1 in 21952 (ie the likelihood equal to (1/28)^3).
Obviously that is not believable!
I haven't been able to find any links about the problems of judge assignments in California but the issue is topical. Senator Tillis has been active here:
Judicial Conference issues policy regarding random assignment of judges
But so has also none other than our "dear friend" Senator Schumer. As always the Democrats are accusing people of things they are doing themselves:
Thanks for those links. My eyes are drooping so I’ll try to read them in the morning.
Also, it seems like this Al Baker guy - the spokesman for those who assigned Merchan to all of the Trump cases - might be a good name for Jim Jordan’s committee to have. He’s publicly admitted to breaking the rules, and called it common practice. An admission that NYC is corrupt as heck.
I really need to go to bed but I can’t shut my brain off.
I wonder how many of Loren Merchan’s clients are associated with NYC courts in some way. Normal justices have to be elected, though it sounds like it’s pretty much the democrat party that chooses who gets in.
It just seems too convenient that the justice randomly assigned to the Trump grand jury (and thus to all the cases dealing with Trump, his company, and his allies) just so happened to have illegally contributed to Joe Biden and an advocacy group to fight MAGA. It would be interesting to look at the names of the other 27 justices who could have gotten the appointment, and see if any of them have violated the ethics code by donating to political candidates and/or groups. Their names can be found at https://ww2.nycourts.gov/courts/1jd/criminal/judicial.shtml
Did they not take Merchan out of the running because there weren’t any justices to choose from who hadn’t already made their conflict of interest publicly-known? If he was the only justice who violated ethics in this way, it almost seems like his small donations were his way of alerting the “random” process that he would be a good justice to “get Trump”. Otherwise, why would he violate ethics rules to make such small donations?
The difference was an error on my part. I used the same technique that calculating a royal flush would use. Everytime you pull a card out of the deck you have one less for the next pull. I thought 28*27*26 was the probability but it’s not like every time a judge card gets pulled that is one less time for it to be in the deck. It is simply 28 cubed in this case.
These links are about civil cases regarding federal issues, where any jurisdiction has standing to hear the cases. Of course, all the cases are appealable within the federal court system.
It seems to me that if Chuck Schumer et al recognize the importance of not cherry-picking judges for their political views in such a situation, they should ALL THE MORE recognize the importance of random assignment of cases in CRIMINAL cases, and especially in STATE criminal cases, where the appeals options are much more limited.
The 14th Amendment requires each state to provide due process and equal protection under the law. For criminal trials at least, that concept should include the right to not have your criminal case deliberately given to somebody who has publicly stated (through financial contributions to activist groups) their desire to eliminate all your supporters. In just the general sense this would be sort of like a Black person being assured that his rape trial would not be deliberately assigned to the head of the KKK.
But assigning Trump’s cases to Merchan was even more egregious than that, because it’s not just a general animosity toward a generic group such as Blacks but it is a very specific, targeted animosity towards the actual defendant in question. And it’s not just an issue with Trump. We see the same kind of crap with Chutkan being given most of the J6 cases.
Giving jurisdiction only to courts where the alleged crimes occurred guarantees that places like DC and NYC can continue their corruption because there are no judges who protect the interests and rights of people who are not from the same banana republic as the judges. Why couldn’t a defendant from Texas, for instance, be able to ask for a randomly-assigned court anywhere in the country to be given jurisdiction and be assigned the case for alleged crimes occuring in DC? That change of venue would prevent the judicial hellholes we’ve all been watching in horror - while also preventing judge shopping.
In addition to the attorneys who signed the NYC Bar document, we have Chuck Schumer and his allies claiming the importance of random selection of judges. These people should ALL be pressured to speak up on the very court cases that should NOT involve political leanings at all: criminal trials.
Does anybody know how to get ahold of Elise Stefanik? If her staffers could do some outreach to these specific people, perhaps at the very least we could work on building consensus regarding this country’s need to prevent kangaroo courts like Merchan’s. We all care about the Trump case because we support Trump so we see what is being done to him. But this has been done to the “little people” for a long, long time, and those who have had to live within a judicial system that is rigged against them will easily see how their fate is tied to Trump’s. If we use the blatant corruption against Trump to attack the kangaroo court systems, a lot of Blacks and others will reap the benefits as well - which is also a great reason for all of us, of all political persuasions, to unite to address the injustices.